MySpace Open Platform: Connect MySpace users to your site and to your apps

This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. Today's post is a guest post written by Scott Seely, Architect for the MySpace Open Platform.

MySpace will be talking about two big things at Google I/O this year: MySpaceID and MySpace Apps.

MySpaceID delivers social functionality and experiences by linking MySpace accounts with your site. These services allow users to quickly register using their MySpace credentials as well as post status messages, publish activities into MySpace, discover friends, and view MySpace activity and profile data on your site! The users’ friends see all these updates, which drive traffic to your site and attract new users to register. By leveraging MySpace’s social graph, you add virally to the buzz about your site and increase the number of visitors to it.

For a broad overview of MySpaceID, please watch this video:



We provide SDKs for MySpaceID. You can use the SDKs or directly use our REST endpoints. We have SDKs available for a variety of languages: PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Java, and JavaScript. This brings the benefits of MySpaceID to a wide range of developers. The JavaScript SDK runs on the client, all other versions run on your servers. These options allow you to achieve smooth workflows and reduce implementation costs by working with the skills you use as a developer.

MySpaceID supports both OAuth and the OpenID-Auth hybrid—you choose the mechanism that makes the most sense for your scenario. Both options are exposed in our SDKs. Once a user logs in and allows your site to access their data, you have access to a wealth of their MySpace data. The MySpace endpoints support Portable Contacts and OpenSocial 0.9 REST, giving you access to plenty of information.

MySpace Apps provides developers with a canvas to create engaging social applications that are deeply integrated into MySpace. The applications are built using the OpenSocial specification, which we are evolving with partners like Google, and Yahoo!. With OpenSocial 0.9, you will see advances in markup, allowing you to remove much of your JavaScript and instead use OpenSocial Markup Language, OSML, to declare which friends you want loaded. This work all happens on MySpace’s servers, reducing calls for data and greatly improving the application experience. When you do need to contact your own servers, you can send Ajax calls through our proxies to your servers. These calls are all signed by the MySpace infrastructure so that you know the request came from a trusted source. The MySpaceID SDK allows your server to access and set MySpace user data in this scenario. So long as the user has installed your application, your servers can access their data.

These are some of the ways that MySpaceID enables you to leverage MySpace API’s off-site and let users into your site with their social media identity and data. Earlier this year, MySpace was the first social network to allow syndication of its users’ activity streams. We hope you are as excited as we are to be part of this fundamental shift in the portability of user identity and data on the Internet.

MySpace Apps and MySpaceID are a lot more than what we’ve talked about here. We invite you to find out more by attending:

• “Building a Business with Social Apps” – Gerard Capiel, VP of Product for the MySpace Open Platform, will share his experiences on monetization of apps.
• Developer Sandbox – Come by and see actual apps in action, try building an app on the spot, and talk to our developers.
• Fireside Chat - Ask those hard questions, discuss approaches to problems, and think about the future with MySpace developers and the OpenSocial engineering team

We hope that you will come away convinced that MySpace is focused on empowering app owners and web site owners with the tools to succeed. See you at Google I/O!

Guest Post by Scott Seely, Architect for the MySpace Open Platform